Web servers are the wellsprings of the World Wide Web, providing pages and other content to browsers and other Web-savvy applications on demand. The pecking order in the Web server world hasn’t changed much in years, with the open-source Apache Web server typically responsible for over 50 percent of all active sites and Microsoft’s server coming in second, at a little over 10 percent of active sites. Now, an upstart project has overtaken Microsoft and is poised to threaten Apache’s dominance.

The software, and its San Francisco–based parent company, is called Nginx (pronounced “engine x”). Like Apache, Nginx is an open-source server. But unlike Apache, Nginx wasn’t formed in the Web’s earliest days, when websites were relatively simple. It appeared during the 2000s as the Web matured and mobile platforms, social media, and bandwidth-choking Web streaming had emerged as new challenges for server design. Nginx at its best, in other words, is something of a 21st-century host for 21st-century Internet traffic.

Web servers are the wellsprings of the World Wide Web, providing pages and other content to browsers and other Web-savvy applications on demand. The pecking order in the Web server world hasn’t changed much in years, with the open-source Apache Web server typically responsible for over 50 percent of all active sites and Microsoft’s server coming in second, at a little over 10 percent of active sites. Now, an upstart project has overtaken Microsoft and is poised to threaten Apache’s dominance.

The software, and its San Francisco–based parent company, is called Nginx (pronounced “engine x”). Like Apache, Nginx is an open-source server. But unlike Apache, Nginx wasn’t formed in the Web’s earliest days, when websites were relatively simple. It appeared during the 2000s as the Web matured and mobile platforms, social media, and bandwidth-choking Web streaming had emerged as new challenges for server design. Nginx at its best, in other words, is something of a 21st-century host for 21st-century Internet traffic.